Why am I not showing up · 3 min · October 23, 2026

What is Google Search Console, and do I need it?

It is Google's own report on your site, it is free, and it is the only place these numbers exist. Yes, you need it. Here is what to read in it.

Written by Footprnt, from Google's own definitions

Search Console is a free report from Google about your own site. It says which searches showed it, how many people saw each result, how many clicked, and where you sat. Nothing else has these numbers. Every tool that claims to, estimates.

Setting it up

Add your site, prove it is yours with a record where your domain is registered, and wait a day. Google then fills in the last sixteen months. There is nothing to install on the site.

What to read first

Under Performance, the searches with the most impressions and the fewest clicks: those are titles to fix. Under Pages, anything Google says it is not listing, with its reason. That is most of what matters, and it fits on one screen.

What is hard about it

The words. Impressions, the average spot, excluded, crawled but not indexed. Each is a plain idea under a strange name. The posts here take them one at a time.

Footprnt reads Search Console for you and turns each number into a sentence about one of your pages, every Monday.